


The Speed at Which Stars Decay

by anslin



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Forgetting, Ghosts, It's kinda sad, Memories, TARDIS - Freeform, space
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-17
Updated: 2015-09-17
Packaged: 2018-04-21 05:46:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,313
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4817342
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anslin/pseuds/anslin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As it turns out, there are three broken hearts in the room, and the difference between cracked and shattered really is so small, but that doesn’t even mean anything when, in the end, one doesn’t work and two do.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Speed at Which Stars Decay

_She’s surprised to find that it doesn’t hurt as much as she thought it would. It’s more of a spreading numbness, really, a hazy sort of unreality. Liquid metal dribbles from her slack lips, and she can hear her heartbeat throbbing in her rib cage. It’s nothing like the stories; there are no goodbyes, no whispered words. It will take time for her body to give out, but she’s dead to the world as soon as the first bullet hits._

_The only one who sings her to her sleep is her faltering heart, and she feels like a little girl again, a little girl who forgot to check for monsters under the bed._

_She doesn’t have the strength or care to close her eyes, but she does have a last thought, and it isn’t about the man beside her, or the love she feels for him, nor is it about her family. Instead, she thinks that forever is so much shorter than she thought it was._

_She never was all that great at math._

_Her mind is breaking, fraying at the edges, and she is dimly aware that he is carrying her back into his blue box, but slowly the pain is starting to creep in and then each step is agony._

_She tries to scream but only blood slips out, and when the darkness finally comes for her she lets go, because it hurts._

_Somewhere, someone is telling her to hold on, but it doesn’t seem to matter anymore._

 

Beside her, he doesn’t move, doesn’t cry, and she’s not surprised, because the day he cries is the day the universe falls apart. In front of him lies a broken girl, and she finds her eyes drawn to the corpse, because she’s never seen herself from the outside before. He begs her to wake up, and she thinks he must have forgotten that it’s only an empty husk he’s speaking to, but in the end it doesn’t matter because nothing happens anyway.

His faith in her, however strong it was, breaks at that moment, and it hurts her to see it, because she is right there, but her fingers pass through his when she reaches for his hand. She wishes with everything she has to be alive again, but the emptiness in his eyes is all the answer she needs.

For all the power he claims to have, there is no magic for bringing the dead back to life.

After awhile he falls silent, and that’s worse, because she can see him wrestling with his mind, trying to silence the memories, the heartache. He lets his fingertips gently brush her eyelids closed, lays his coat atop her shoulders, seeming suddenly so frail. If he squints, he can almost pretend she’s just sleeping.

He doesn’t move after that, and she stands vigil by him.

She was never one for praying, but just this time she does, prays to whatever god there is, or was, or might be. Prays that she might wake up in her own bed come morning.

Pleads that she shouldn’t have to watch her own funeral.

As it turns out, there are three broken hearts in the room, and the difference between cracked and shattered really is so small, but that doesn’t even mean anything when, in the end, one doesn’t work and two do.

If he taught her one thing, it’s that it’s the small things that count.

Outside the windows, galaxies are spinning, stars dying and being born, bursting into clouds of dust that will form whole new solar systems, whole new civilizations. They will grow, and grow until they fall apart and fade away, and they will conquer other worlds and think they own the universe.

And then one day, they will be gone, and their dust will simply remake what they destroyed.

In the end, the universe doesn’t change; it’s simply caught in a cycle. The planets, the civilizations, the stardust, they will all be different, but no matter what the same things will always happen, over and over again.

Galaxies will die.

Stars will flash and disappear.

Little girls will bleed out on the dismal ground of foreign worlds.

Ghosts will watch the world move on without them.

She thinks about how many people would kill to live after living, like she does now. Well, they can have it all. She doesn’t want it.

All she really wants is to hug the man mourning her in silence, and tell him it will be alright, that she was happy in the end. That she loved him, loves him still, for whatever it’s worth.

He’s begging to be happy, and it won’t work.

It takes him a long time before he stands up and lifts her body gently from the floor. She can see his hands shaking as she walks beside him, and does everything in her power not to look herself in the face, because death has never seemed so real than when she does.

He brings the corpse to the door, and lets it go among the twinkling lights of empty space, and at first that stings, that he would let go of her body like that, as though it were worth nothing. It takes her both too long and not much time at all to realize that he’s giving her a chance to dance free among the stars, to travel forever, even when everything else has ended.

And her body will fall apart and become the air she once breathed and the suns people sing to.

He gave her the only forever he could.

There is a ghost and a lord of Time in a box that has never been smaller, that has never seemed both so suffocating and so impossibly vast. And one can’t hear the other, but she still tries, whispers it in his ear:

_I’m never going to leave you._

But the bald truth is there, plain to see.

She’s already left.

Days later, he tries eating something. Thinks maybe the emptiness gnawing at his inside is simply hunger. He can’t even get the first bite down, and she begins to worry there might be two ghosts on this spaceship soon. He grows gaunt, pale, and angry.

Perhaps weeks later, maybe months, maybe years, she doesn’t know anymore, he seems to wake up from his reverie. He eats his fill, jumps about the room as though there was never any blood on the grating, and travels as though no one is missing. She knows that it’s just him going forward, like the allotted time has passed, and now he can move on, but it’s so sudden, it feels like it was timed, staged.

Selfish of her, maybe, to think that. Nine hundred years of time and space, he’s learned what loss feels like; pain is the real companion he travels with, not her, nor a journalist, nor anyone else.

Still, it hurts when he picks up a rose and smells it, and doesn’t even blink.

She breaks, collapses on the ground and cries until her tears have all dried, and only then does she look up and realize he’s left her.

Really, it wasn’t his fault. He didn’t even know she was there, doesn’t know what he’s lost.

He’s left it all behind for good, now.

 

Carefully hidden in the depths of a time machine there is a small mauve box, and inside of it are memories of a pink and yellow girl, because he never really learned to cope, and sometimes the easiest thing to do is forget.

There was a girl, then a ghost, but she’s stardust now, because even the dead don’t live forever, if there is no one willing to remember them.

           

_Pain and loss, they define us as much as happiness or love. Whether it's a world, or a relationship... Everything has its time. And **everything ends.**_

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you guys liked it!  
> Once again, any comments/review would be greatly appreciated.


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